History Is Not the Past

Racial Integration in NYC Public Housing 1940s

In the 1940s and 50s, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) intentionally integrated public housing projects. They did it quietly in order to avoid opposition. Nicholas Dagen Bloom has written about this in Public Housing that Worked. I’d like to write an article about the people behind these efforts — and the documents I found in the NYCHA archives at LaGuardia, but meanwhile, here are a few items (above).

Brief description of each slide:

01-Julia Waxman (Julius Rosenwald Fund) letter to NYCHA. How have you succeeded in integrating public housing?

02-Gerard Butler of NYCHA responds to Julia Waxman at the Rosenwald Fund to say racial integration hasn’t caused any extraordinary or unsolvable problems